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Day 36 – Schabas on Syria; UNDP Oversight; Arab-Israeli Conflict Passé?

Today was the thirty sixth day of Operation Protective Edge.

The Tower  Today recalled remarks made by William Schabas pegged by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to head an investigation into Israel’s Operation Protective Edge. Last year Schabas rejected the notion that Syria could have or had committed war crimes by using chemical weapons.

An audit conducted by the United Nations raised fears that the lack of oversight exercised by the United Nations Development Programme could have allowed Hamas to acquire the materials it needed for constructing the terror tunnels it built in recent years to attack Israel.

An op-ed in a London-based Saudi paper, A Sharq al-Awsat, asserted that the Israeli-Arab conflict doesn’t exist anymoreMamoun Fandy wrote, “The conflict in now regionalized at the geopolitical level, with Iran and Turkey directly involved through their backing Hezbollah and Hamas respectively.” Fandy even allowed that the current regional realignment, with non-Arab Iran and Turkey supporting extremists, could lead to a peace deal between Israel and much of the Arab world.

Writing in Newsweek Benny Avni evaluated Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s victory earlier this week in the race for president of Turkey, “His victory in the presidential election is just the start, and he has made clear he plans to change the constitution so that he can more easily dominate every aspect of the country.”

A leaked document from the ongoing Egypt sponsored indirect ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas has provided some details of Hamas’ apparent retreat on some of its demands. The Israeli daily Yediot Achronot reported that among the demands being shelved are “Hamas’ demands for a seaport and airport.”

Though ISIS has made significant gains in northern Iraq recently, including the capture of the Mosul dam, earlier this week Kurdish troops supported by American airstrikes managed to reverse some of the ISIS gains.

Israel21c reports that scientists at the Weizmann Institute developed a “photonic router.” This router is thought to be one of the building blocks for quantum computing. A quantum computer would “harness the power of atoms and molecules to perform memory and processing tasks,” and would be significantly faster than silicon based computers that we have now.

 [Photo: Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs / Flickr ]